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Posts tagged ‘Yahoo News’

DONETSK, Ukraine (AP) — More than 5,000 pro-Russia residents of a major city in Ukraine’s east demonstrated on Saturday in favor of holding a referendum on whether to seek to split off and become part of Russia.

The rally in Donetsk came less than a week after the Ukrainian region of Crimea approved secession in a referendum regarded as illegitimate by the Western countries. After the referendum, Russia moved to formally annex Crimea.

Russia said on Friday it reserved the right to protect compatriots in eastern Ukraine after clashes in the city of Donetsk in which one person was killed. source – Business Insider

With Crimea now effectively under the control of Russian forces, which ring Ukrainian military bases on the strategic Black Sea peninsula, concern is rising that Ukraine’s eastern regions will agitate for a similar move.

Russia has brought large military contingents to areas near the border with eastern Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said there is no intention to move into eastern Ukraine, but the prospect of violence between pro- and anti-secession groups in the east could be used as a pretext for sending in troops.

Eastern Ukraine is the heartland of Ukraine’s economically vital heavy industry and mining and the support base for Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president who fled to Russia last month after being ousted in the wake of three months of protests in the capital, Kiev.

Russia and Yanukovych supporters contend Yanukovych’s ouster was a coup and allege that the authorities who then came to power are nationalists who would oppress the east’s large ethnic Russian population.

“They’re trying to tear us away from Russia,” said demonstrator Igor Shapoval, a 59-year-old businessman. “But Donbass is ready to fight against this band which already lost Crimea and is losing in the east.”

Donbass is the name for the region of factories and mines that includes Donetsk. The demonstrators erected about several tents, an ironic echo of the massive tent camp that was established on Kiev’s central square after the protests against Yanukovych broke out in late November.

“I’m ready to live in a tent, but I’m not ready to submit to the West, to dance to their tune,” said Viktor Rudko, a 43-year-old miner.

The local parliament on Friday formed a working group to develop a referendum analogous to the one in Crimea. Activists on Saturday passed out mock ballots, although no referendum has been formally called.source – Yahoo News

Now, I wonder whatever happened to that “red line” that John Kerry and Barack Obama said Russia better not cross? It would appear that the “red line” has become a Red Dawn of the Russian Army in Ukraine.

Memo to the White House: Now would be a good time for more sanctions, maybe against Putin’s butler and his third grade teacher?

SEVASTOPOL/SIMFEROPOL, Ukraine (Reuters) – Russian troops and unarmed men stormed Ukraine’s naval headquarters in the Crimean port of Sevastopol on Wednesday and raised the Russian flag in a tense but peaceful takeover that signals Moscow’s intent to neutralize any armed opposition.

Russian soldiers, and so-called “self-defense” units of mainly unarmed volunteers who are supporting them across the Black Sea peninsula, moved in early in the morning and quickly took control.

Shortly after the incident, Ukraine’s acting Defence Minister Ihor Tenyukh said in Kiev that the country’s forces would not withdraw from Crimea even though Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a treaty to make it part of Russia. But an hour later, Ukrainian servicemen, unarmed and in civilian clothing, began walking out of the headquarters.

Interfax Ukraine news agency said the commander of the Ukrainian navy, Admiral Serhiy Haiduk, was among those who left and was driven away by officers of Russia’s FSB intelligence service. The report could not be independently confirmed.

The first group of servicemen was followed within a few minutes by a handful of troops in Ukrainian uniform, looking shell-shocked at the dramatic turn of events.

“This morning they stormed the compound. They cut the gates open, but I heard no shooting,” said Oleksander Balanyuk, a captain in the navy.

“This thing should have been solved politically. Now all I can do is stand here at the gate. There is nothing else I can do,” he told Reuters, appearing ashamed and downcast.

Russia’s Itar-Tass news agency reported that Alexander Vitko, commander of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet which is based in Sevastopol, had been involved in talks at the headquarters. source – Yahoo News

Reuters Dubai – Iran is moving ahead with testing more efficient uranium enrichment technology, a spokesman for its atomic energy agency said on Saturday, in news that may concern world powers who last month agreed a deal to curb Tehran’s atomic activities.

Spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi was quoted by state news agency IRNA as saying that initial testing on a new generation of more sophisticated centrifuges had been completed, underlining Iran’s determination to keep refining uranium in what it says is work to make fuel for a planned network of nuclear power plants.

Although the development does not appear to contravene the interim agreement struck between world powers and Iran last month, it may concern the West nonetheless, as the material can also provide the fissile core of a nuclear bomb if enriched to a high degree.

“The new generation of centrifuges was produced with a higher capacity compared with the first generation machines and we have completed initial tests,” Kamalvandi was quoted as saying.

“The production of a new generation of centrifuges is in line with the (Iranian atomic energy) agency’s approach of upgrading the quality of enrichment machines and increasing the rate of production by using the maximum infrastructure facilities”.

Iran’s development of a new generation of centrifuges – machines that spin at supersonic speed to increase the ratio of the fissile isotope – could enable it to refine uranium much faster.

Under the November 24 interim accord with the six world powers, Iran promised not to start operating them or install any more for a period of six months. But the agreement seems to allow it to continue with research and development activity at a nearby Natanz pilot plant.

Iran earlier this year stoked the West’s worries by starting to install a new centrifuge – the IR-2m – at its Natanz enrichment plant. Iran is testing the IR-2m and other models at its research and development facility at Natanz.

Kamalvandi did not specify whether the new centrifuge model he was referring to was the IR-2m.

It is currently using a 1970s model, the IR1, to refine uranium at the main Natanz plant and its efforts to replace this breakdown-prone centrifuge are being closely watched.

Some experts believe the IR-2m can enrich uranium 2-3 times faster than the IR-1.

U.N. inspectors arrived in Tehran on Saturday and are due for the first time in more than two years to visit a plant linked to a planned heavy-water reactor that could yield nuclear bomb fuel, taking up an initial gesture by Iran to open its disputed nuclear programme up to greater scrutiny. source – Yahoo News.

From Yahoo News: On Wednesday night, as the House of Representatives was voting on a last-minute deal to end the 16-day budget stalemate, a long-time House stenographer calmly stepped up to the rostrum and started shouting into a microphone.

The microphone she was yelling into was turned off, but lawmakers and staffers report she was ranting about Free Masons, the devil and the House being divided.

The woman, identified by ABC News and other sources as Dianne Reidy, was quickly pulled off the rostrum by House security officers.

As she was being led away, she was heard to shout, “This is not one nation under God. It never was.”

A number of staffers who said they knew the woman well told CNN’s Dana Bash the incident surprised and saddened them.

“She’s a well-known person, she’s a perfectly nice person, a good colleague, somebody who’s respectable and dependable, and this is very surprising to everybody who works with her,” Bash reported. source – Yahoo News.

“It is the worst law ever passed in the last four decades by the federal government,” Stockman argues in the video above. “It is a massive entitlement to end all entitlements. It is going to cause a fiscal hemorrhage that is not even yet anticipated. It will tie up one-sixth of GDP in the most monstrous, massive, bureaucratic snarl that you can’t imagine. So therefore this needs to be stopped before it becomes operational.”

That’s a slightly worse financial position than Treasury predicted last month and adds to the pressure on Congress to increase the government’s borrowing cap soon to avert a first-ever U.S. default on its obligations.

The government reached its $16.7 trillion debt limit in May. Since then, it has been using “extraordinary measures” such as suspending U.S. investments in federal employee trust funds to create about $300 billion in additional borrowing room.

But on the 17th the government will be left with only its cash cushion and daily receipts to pay its bills. Lew warned that before long it would not be able to meet all of its obligations. Economists and financial market experts warn that the stock market could plummet and that investors would demand higher returns on Treasury notes, which could raise interest rates and harm the economy.

A House-passed stopgap spending measure pending before the Senate contains a GOP-backed provision that would give Social Security recipients and bondholders priority in receiving payments from the government.

Lew again rejected the idea.

“The United States should never have to choose, for example, whether to pay Social Security to seniors, pay benefits to our veterans, or make payments to state and local jurisdictions and health care providers under Medicare and Medicaid,” Mr. Lew said. “There is no way of knowing the damage any prioritization plan would have on our economy and financial markets. It would represent an irresponsible retreat from a core American value: We are a nation that honors all of its commitments.”

Will the phrase “Guns of August” one day refer not only to the prelude to World War I in 1914 but also to the prelude to a Middle East war in 2013?

That is the ominous question posed by Roger Boyes, the diplomatic editor of the Times of London and a foreign correspondent for the past 35 years.

“The direction of events in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran should keep us awake at night. History is taking a dangerous turn,” he writes. “The region certainly cannot sustain two wars — Syria’s bloody insurgency and a near-civil war in Egypt — without wrecking established peace treaties and the normal mechanisms for defusing conflict.”

I sat down with Boyes in our London newsroom. He acknowledged that the conflicts coursing through a half-dozen Middle Eastern countries did not come from a single source, nor did they stem from a single reason.

But he feared the problems were becoming intractable and were spreading across state borders: “the new Sunni assertiveness, the rise of the jihad, the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood not only in Egypt but in every Arab society.”

And Boyes warned that, as in August 1914, the world was not paying enough attention.

“In August 1914 there was a lot of grouse shooting going on. In August 2013, politicians prefer to read doorstopper biographies in Tuscany and Cornwall. Yet the spreading Middle East crisis, its multiple flashpoints, is every bit as ominous as the prelude to war in 1914.”

The news certainly seems to get worse by the day. The West is now directly blaming the Assad regime for using chemical weapons against its own people in Syria. The drumbeat toward a military strike in Syria grows louder by the hour.

The U.K. is “making contingency plans,” according to the prime minister’s spokesman.

“The use of chemical weapons in the 21st century, on a large scale like this, cannot go unaddressed, cannot be ignored,” warned the French president.

And as the United States’ top diplomat put it: “President Obama believes there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Western officials warn that the decision of whether to attack Syria will be made this week.